


Winter Lady

by LadyJanus



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: F/M, Songfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-18
Updated: 2016-03-18
Packaged: 2018-05-27 11:20:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,369
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6282574
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyJanus/pseuds/LadyJanus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A small piece I wrote early in BSG, just after New Caprica, and long before we got the finale we received. The song used is a classic by the incomparable Leonard Cohen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Winter Lady

Winter Lady

 

 

Travelling lady stay a while

Until the night is over

I'm just a station on your way

I know I'm not your lover

 

_"It's alright," she tells me, smiling sadly. “We all have pasts ... people in our past.”_

_I roll off her; we've both reached completion, but we're both far from satisfaction. She sits up and reaches for her blouse._

_"I'm not exactly a babe in the woods, you know," she continues as she shrugs it on._

_No, she's not young. But she's not old either ... thirty-five, maybe forty. She wear's a platinum ring with a large diamond set in it. She has explained that it is an engagement ring; she's promised to be married._

_One of Earth's battalion of diplomats and linguists sent out to meet a fleet of starving refugee cousins from across the stars--she is their best at ancient and dead languages._

_"I'm just a military brat with a flair for languages," she told me at our first meeting. "My dad was posted at military bases all over the world when I was a child; if I expected to survive, I had to learn to talk the talk and walk the walk no matter where I was."_

_They tell me there are over six thousand extant languages spoken on Earth. And there are thousands of dead ones._

_She's been almost everywhere on the planet below, but this is her first time in space._

_She marvels at our ships ... our artificial gravity ... our scanners. She does not see the threadbare deck plates where thousands of feet have trod these last ten years ... our desperate need for fuel ... our inability to resolve our scans barely beyond this system's perimeter Oort Cloud ... the Cylons still pursuing us ..._

_My people marvel at the food and basic necessities she and her colleagues have procured for us. They do not see the pollution ... the terrifying background radiation ... the ruined coastal cities ... the encroaching deserts on plains of golden grain ... the runaway greenhouse cycle..._

_She's pulling on her pants now and I finally gather the courage to reach for her. She smiles at me again over her shoulder, pulls up her pants and fastens them. Then she sits back down, reaches over and smoothes back my snow-white hair from my face with infinite tenderness._

_All at once, she is warm and real._

_She lies down on top the covers. She's on her side facing me; her eyes are emerald green, her hair deep auburn. "A real Irish Colleen," she'd laughed earlier at the reception for Earth's United Nations delegates, when I found her in a corner trying to tame it back into the elaborate upswept style she'd been wearing. I told her that it looked beautiful down and with a low, delighted chuckle, she pulled out all the pins and allowed the heavy mass to tumble down about her shoulders._

_"Who is she?" she asks now about the ghost lying between us. "Who is Laura?"_

 

I lived with a child of snow

When I was a soldier

And I fought every man for her

Until the nights grew colder

 

_Our saviour. Our Pythia._

_"What happened to her?"_

_We betrayed her ... I betrayed her._

_"I can hardly believe that of you, Admiral. You're no Judas," she says with firm conviction._

_There are myriad religions on Earth. Like the Cylons, she and many of her brethren follow one God; she follows the teachings of a man nailed to a cross over two thousand years ago. The children’s primer she gave me is translated into Old Caprican or Ancient Greek as they call it. It makes for interesting reading; no doubt the original would make for even more interesting reading._

_Judas. No, I am no Judas. At least Judas betrayed their saviour for something concrete. I betrayed our savour for an ideal ... for democracy and the will of the people. No, I broke faith with her because she didn’t live up to my self-righteous ideal ... because she was willing to make the hard choices ... because she chose to be practical in the face of our people’s destruction at the hands of two men; a power-hungry terrorist and an enemy collaborator. I lost faith in her and in doing so, sent her to her death ... into Zarek and Baltar's trap of New Caprica because she’d known it was the only way to save our people when it came time to pay the price for their folly._

_She’d found us the path to Earth, had we only the courage to follow it to the end. But the people were tired and impatient and human beings always look for the easy way out. Zarek and Baltar told them what they wanted to hear ... led them down to that gods-misbegotten planet and they had climbed over each other--trampled her into the mud--to get there. And I let them because she’d disappointed me ... because for her it had never been about nobility and ideals, only the survival of our people. I’d forgotten that._

_From the first moment after the holocaust, she’d known that the only thing that counted was survival. “We have to get out there and start making babies,” she’d told me that first day. She had known even then she would die ... that there would be no babies for her. But then she’d thought it would be because of the cancer ravaging her body; I never imagined it would be because of me. A Cylon centurion might have put those three bullets through her heart, but I’d already inflicted the fatal blow over a year before._

_The last time I saw her, she was lying bloody and broken in the snow and I dared not stop to mourn her ... or even to touch her one last time. I could only gather as many of our people as I could find and run for the transports ... try to find her path again._

_And I only saved as many as I did because of her ... because she’d led the resistance after the Cylons found our people again, herded like so many sheep into Baltar’s pen. All I could do was take my undermanned ships--which I’d stupidly allowed Baltar to gut of people and effectiveness--and flee. But she’d known that the Cylons would come and made plans that had set the stage for a successful resistance until I could get our ships in shape to fight for them._

_When the Colonies were destroyed, she saved fifty thousand. I ran from New Caprica with less than twenty thousand; we are fewer than fifteen thousand today._

_"She sounds extraordinary. But what was the woman like--this paragon?"_

 

She used to wear her hair like you

Except when she was sleeping

And then she'd weave it on a loom

Of smoke and gold and breathing

 

_She would have been the last person to describe herself as a paragon. But I guess one might say she was just that ... a paragon ... an archetype perhaps ... the Mother-Goddess, Gaia, fighting for her children ... fighting to keep them from being devoured._

_No, she was only a woman ... beautiful in her own way, with her own strengths and weaknesses like any woman. She loved and hated ... was by turns wonderfully passionate and terribly cold ... at times she could be caring, contemptuous, expansive and horribly calculating. But she could also giggle infectiously like a schoolgirl or be ruthless and scathingly vicious. And then there were the times she was oh, so tender and warm and real and--alive in my arms ... those times when she gave and accepted love in equal measure._

_No, in the end, she was only a woman I left to die alone in the snow._

 

And why are you so quiet now

Standing there in the doorway?

You chose your journey long before

You came upon this highway

 

_She is silent now as she rises from my bed again and walks away. I watch her go and say nothing. At the threshold, she stops. She stands there for a long moment twisting the ring on her finger._

 

_Travelling lady stay a while_

_Until the night is over_

_I'm just a station on your way_

_I know I'm not your lover_

 

 


End file.
